Rent & Reality: How Toronto Students Afford to Create 

The stark glow of a laptop illuminates a cramped apartment as a student videographer watches the same scene for the tenth time. Empty coffee cups sit right next to an external hard drive, while tomorrow’s shift at work starts in just a few hours. Between tuition payments, rent, and deadlines, creating art has become something squeezed into the hours leftover. Yet despite the exhaustion, they press play one more time. 

Across Canada, many creatives strive to build careers and pursue their passions in cities like Vancouver, Edmonton, Toronto, and Montreal. However, for many students, Toronto represents both challenge and opportunity. As one of Canada’s largest creative hubs, the city offers access to film, theatre, music, visual arts, fashion, and writing communities. Alongside its many opportunities comes a harsh reality: the rising costs of living, tuition, and the challenge of finding time to create. 

For many of Toronto’s student creatives, artistic ambitions often exist alongside financial pressures. Whether they’re editing a short film after work, rehearsing for a production between classes, or sketching designs late into the night, many are finding ways to keep creating in one of Canada’s most expensive cities. 

Why Toronto Attracts Creatives 

For many emerging artists, Toronto represents countless possibilities. The city is home to internationally recognized film festivals, theatres, art galleries, music venues, fashion events, and creative communities that attract aspiring filmmakers, actors, designers, writers, musicians, fashionistas, and visual artists from across the country. 

For students, those opportunities can be especially appealing. Access to networking events, internships, fashion shows, creative collaborations and a diverse cultural landscape allows many to develop both their artistic practices and professional careers while still in school. 

But what keeps student creatives in Toronto isn’t just the industry’s presence – it’s the people and sense of community. The opportunity to collaborate with classmates and industry professionals, attend local exhibitions, performances, fashion events, and community showcases, and find inspiration in the city’s neighbourhoods creates an environment where creativity can flourish. For many, the city itself becomes part of the creative process. 

The Cost of Creating: How Students Keep Making Art Anyway 

To explore how student creatives navigate Toronto’s opportunities and challenges, three students shared how they balance their creative work with school, employment, finances, and community. 

Siobhan 

For Siobhan, a student creative who was born in London, Ontario, and has spent most of their undergraduate career in Toronto, the two cities have influenced their creative work in different ways. While London has inspired slower-paced media projects, they describe Toronto as a faster city that has influenced them to create work at a quicker pace. 

“Nowadays, having lived in Toronto for most of my BA, the content I create is more fast-paced due to the nature of Toronto being a fast city,” Siobhan says. “London I view as a slow city, and so I create slower media projects when I’m there and vice versa.” 

Balancing creative work with university has also meant learning when to step away. Siobhan says they try to make time for breaks and reset days, while other days are spent focusing intensely on several projects or putting their energy into one. 

One of the biggest challenges for Siobhan as a creative student is finding a balance between creating work for school and creating work that feels personally meaningful. 

“I think student artists tend to really struggle with the concept of a project created for school vs. a real-world project,” they say. “You can create both at the same time, but sometimes it’s easier to just do the first option.” 

As they have gotten older, Siobhan says they have learned that neither option has to exist in isolation. School projects can become opportunities to develop ideas that matter to them, while personal projects can continue to exist alongside their academic work. 

Community can also play a complicated role in the creative process. Although Siobhan recommends student filmmaking organizations to people who are just beginning to explore their craft, they increasingly prefer working independently. 

“I find a lot of my ideas are a little too out there for student body groups and they tend to get shut down,” they say. “I lose interest in the project as I have found it has blended out.” 

For Siobhan, working alone allows them to develop ideas without compromising the originality that made them interested in the project in the first place. While creative communities can providevaluable opportunities for collaboration and networking, finding the right people to work with becomes increasingly important as students develop their own creative voices. 

Their experience highlights that the challenges facing student creatives extend beyond the financial cost of making art. Time, academic expectations, collaboration, and creative independence can all shape how students continue pursuing their craft. 

Hazel 

For Hazel, writing is more than a creative outlet – it is something she hopes to build a future around. But pursuing that passion while studying in Toronto comes with financial realities of its own. To help support herself financially, Hazel turns to gig work through Rover and Uber Eats. 

Instead of giving up on her creative ambitions, Hazel has found ways to make her income work around her writing. The flexibility of gig work allows her to earn money while maintaining time for her creative projects, but balancing the two can still be demanding. 

Hazel’s reality of being a student writer means finding a balance between making money and making art. Time spent delivering food or caring for pets is time that could otherwise be spent writing, but that income provides the financial stability needed to continue pursuing her craft. 

Her experience reflects a broader reality for student creatives in Toronto: sometimes, pursuing a creative career means finding work that can support the art rather than replace it. 

James 

For James, photography exists alongside a very different academic path. As an engineering student, his studies are not traditionally associated with the arts, but he still makes time for photography, fitting it in around the babysitting and tutoring gigs he relies on to earn money. 

Living at home with his family has given James some financial flexibility, but making time and money for photography still requires balancing his creative interests with his studies and work. Instead of pursuing photography through an arts program, he has carved out his own space for creativity alongside his engineering education. 

James’ experience challenges the idea that students must be enrolled in a creative arts program to consider themselves artists. For some students, creativity exists alongside a more traditional career path, with photography becoming something they build on their own terms. 

Through gig work and the flexibility of living at home, James has found a way to continue pursuing photography while studying engineering. His experience shows that for student creatives, making art does not always mean choosing between creativity and a practical career – it can mean finding ways to make room for both. 

So how do they afford to? 

For Toronto’s student creatives, the question may not be whether artists can afford the city, but what they have to give up or how they adapt to keep creating in it. Siobhan has learned to balance academic work with projects that feel personally meaningful, while Hazel relies on flexible gig work to support herself without giving up writing. James, meanwhile, has found room for photography alongside an engineering degree and the financial flexibility of living at home. 

Their experiences show that Toronto can offer the community, opportunities, and inspiration that artists need, but access to that creative life is not always straightforward. For some students, it means working outside their creative field, living with family, sacrificing free time, or choosing independence over collaboration. The city may want artists to create, but for student creatives, making art in Toronto often means finding a way to make the city’s demands fit around the work they want to make.